Michael Angelo Woolf was never primarily a political cartoonist in the common sense of the word. He made “[s]ome vigorous cartoons of Tweed during Nast’s raid on the ring, and some cartoons which alternated with Nast’s in the Hayes-Tilden campaign [in the 1880 Presidential election], [which] are remembered as his best work in this line.” But, his obituarist stresses, “he never strayed long from the sketching of types and the preaching of sermons in pictures, half humorous, half pathetic.”[24] The foreword to Sketches of Lowly Life in a Great City, a collection of Woolf’s work published shortly after his death, praised his work and personality:“In the tenderness, sincerity, and simplicity of his work are to be found theelements which were most conspicuous in the personality of the late M. A. Woolf, together with unostentatious charity and a humor, unique in contemporary art, which, while always manly and honest, possessed the power to move as well to tears as to laughter.”[25]

By Martin Lund​​“The father of the modern comic picture -- the man who woke the laughter of a generation [...]-- died at 1 o’clock yesterday morning,” the New York Times declared on March 5, 1899.[1] The deceased was Michael Angelo Woolf, a now largely-forgotten cartoonist who in his own time, as the obituary’s epithets for him suggest, was both well-known and well-liked. Born in London in 1837, Woolf moved to America at a young age and first pursued an acting career in Philadelphia. At the close of the Civil War, he turned his efforts instead to art and went to France for instruction. After returning to America, and beginning in the magazine Wild Oats in the 1870s, Woolf would focus much of his career in cartooning on drawing his then-famous illustrations of “waifs,” a character type that was inspired by New York City street urchins. Returning to the life of the city’s poor time and time again, in a career that spanned some thirty-odd years, Woolf, a generally liberal and sometimes conservative cartoonist, opened up a world of which many of Harper’s Weekly, Judge, and LIFE’s middle class readers had little first-hand knowledge.[2]

By James McGrath Morris Sitting in the shadow of the New York Plaza Hotel, the nearly nude bronze sculpture of Pomona by Karl Bitter atop a six-level water fountain is a graceful work that at night, bathed in golden light, is a serene and peaceful oasis on the southern end of the Grand Army Place at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. To many New Yorker who think they know the man, the fact that Joseph Pulitzer made the bequest for this fountain that speaks of peace is strikingly ironic. Wasn’t he after all the worse purveyor of Yellow Journalism who used his perch of power to help rush America to war with Spain in 1898? No.

By Matthew Goodman In the summer of 1835 Richard Adams Locke was thirty-four years old, and at the height of his powers – editor of the most widely read newspaper in the city. As New York newspaper editors went, Locke cut a decidedly unimposing figure, being of slim build and middling stature (Edgar Allan Poe, who stood five-foot eight, guessed Locke to be an inch shorter than himself), nowhere near as tall as James Gordon Bennett or James Watson Webb, and without Webb’s military bearing, or the literary glamor of the Evening Post’s William Cullen Bryant, or the aristocratic burnish of Mordecai Manuel Noah of the Evening Star. Still, he had a certain presence: In The Literati of New York City Poe observed that Locke’s eyes contained a “calm, clear luminousness”; there was “an air of distinction about his whole person,” as though he had carried with him to New York, along with the family’s five bags and bedding, some of the genteel manner of the world he had left behind.

By Harold SchechterAn exclusive excerpt from the author's new book When Joseph Pulitzer purchased the New York World in May, 1883, a typical front page consisted of a half-dozen columns of densely packed type, unrelieved by illustrations or eye-catching headlines. Viewed from a slight distance, the page resembled a solid block of gray print, so dreary in appearance that the layout was referred to as a “tombstone.” [1]